Today’s post is a guest post from Sofiya Ros, PhD student at University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. Learn more about Sofiya under the contributor bios page!
Senegalese drummers show the practice of playing drums in correlation to speech. These drummers are part of the social class of griots [Hale 1998, Tang 2012], and their most common drum is a single-headed drum known as sabar.
Although sabar drums are rarely used as a speech surrogate and their main function is to affect the listener rather than to convey a message, it is clear that the practices of playing the sabar involve a close connection to linguistic expressions. In personal interviews griots say that ‘the sabar can speak’ and utter spoken expressions in correlation to sabar rhythms they play [Winter 2014: 646].
To what extent do such correlations justify the claim that Sabar is a drum language?
Playing the sabar involves at least 9 different drum strokes (hand strokes, stick strokes or their combination), which can be seen as the basic phonemic units of the genre. These strokes compose different longer Sabar rhythms which can be correlated with spoken utterances in Wolof — the lingua-franca of Senegal.
Mapping between Sabar and Wolof is not as clear as in more well-known cases of speech surrogacy on drums (e.g. the Yoruba drum language). Yoruba has three contrastive tones: high, low and middle, and tone counters formed by a combination of two of the tones. The tones and counters of spoken Yoruba can be represented by the notes of the Yoruba drums. The drums literally mimic the spoken utterances, whereas Sabar works differently as Wolof is not tonal.
I am working with the data collected during previous expeditions to Senegal: bàkks (classical phrases in Sabar, not improvised on the spot) and improvisations in Sabar and their translations to Wolof. Our data has the advantage that it includes not only bàkks, which are more like fossils, previously generated phrases learnt by heart, but also improvisations, which attest that Sabar drumming is still productive and its performance is not restricted to an existing repertoire of traditional texts.
So, there they are, Senegalese griots, and here am I, having some recordings of their drumming with translations, trying to find out what lies behind the drumming. I am approaching this problem by finding out the rules of “translation” from Wolof to Sabar rhythms. Sabar exhibits certain rules on its own: rhythm production “involves grammatical operations different from those of the spoken language, and that meaningful sabar rhythms deserve to be studied as a separate object for linguistic research, a drum language referred to as Sabar” [Winter 2014: 645].
Since Sabar rhythms are clearly connected to Wolof, we should be interested in the rules and regularities that govern this connection.
My first step is to find the rules of the translation, the correlation between the rhythms and the spoken language. First, I test the hypothesis on phonological mapping between the two languages, meaning that each stroke of Sabar represents a syllable or a number of syllables in Wolof.
Surprisingly enough, there were enough correlations to assume that the phonological mapping can be a feature, for example, bi (‘the’) is always translated with the ‘gin’ stroke in 45 cases (and only once as ‘tan’):
(1) Adduna bi
tan tan gin gin
‘this world’
However, of course there are irregularities as well:
(2) Jëfee ndigël rekka wóor
turun gin tan tac tan rwan
‘to do what is commanded is the only true way’
(3) Jëf rekk gu baa-xa wóor
ce rwe gin pax gin gin
‘to do to do what is good in the only true way’
In 2 and 3 the same word wóor (‘true’) is drummed differently: as rwan and as gin.
My first statistical analysis has already shown some correlations: for example, ‘gin’ stroke (hand stroke at the edge of the drum) is used to represent short vowels in 1738 cases (87%) and long vowels in 252 cases (13%) and this distribution is significantly different from the general distribution of short and long vowels, so there are significantly more short vowels for gin than in general in the data (X2 = 54.1531, p < .00001).
I am still working on the generalisations, nevertheless, inspire of some irregularities, I am already getting a shadowy feeling that there is a way out of this chaos.
-Sofiya Ros
References
- Hale, Thomas A. 1998. Griots and griottes. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
- Tang, Patricia. 2012. The rapper as a modern griot: Reclaiming ancient traditions. Hip hop Africa: New African music in a globalizing world, ed. by Eric Charry, 79–91. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
- Winter Yoad (2014): “On the Grammar of a Senegalese Drum Language” – Language 90.3, pp. 644-668